111–120 of 169 posts
The idea of the "black wall" to keep out bad ai comes to mind. Not arguing for it but just acknowledging that maybe one day will all have to live in walled gardens to stay safe from rouge ai's or rather rouge actors using powerful ai's
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe we'll go back to trusting local experts that you can meet in person to confirm that they are not a bot. Because anything online will be known to be untrustworthy. Most blogs, chat groups and social media posts will be spam bots. And it'll be impossible for the average person to tell the difference between chatting with a bot and chatting with a human. But humans crave social connections and intimate physica…
I'm not sure the experts have to be local. I can't be sure that a random twitter account isn't a bot, but I can be pretty sure that tweets from @nasa are reasonably trustworthy. People will form webs-of-trust: they trust one source, the people viewed as trustworthy by them, etc. Anyone outside of that will be untrustworthy. That's not too dissimilar from what we do today, after all people have always been able to lie…
Something I've wondered lately is what will life be like in a post-truth society? we already see examples of this now where a large number of people get their news from fake memes on facebook. There are huge swathes of people who live in their own make-believe world, like those believing wholeheartedly that the 2020 election was stolen. What will life be like when you can't trust any video or interview you see becaus…
I just started playing cyberpunk 2077. Spoilers: The idea of the "black wall" to keep out bad ai comes to mind. Not arguing for it but just acknowledging that maybe one day will all have to live in walled gardens to stay safe from rouge ai's or rather rouge actors using powerful ai's
I am not saying it's impossible, but I would like to see that part being explored, even if it's in the tie-ins comics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was listening to "This American Life" and they had a segment on someone who setup an site to give you a random number to call in Russia where you were supposed to give them info about what's happening in the Ukraine. It was someone shocking to hear their side of the story, that Russia is a hero for helping oppresed Russians in Ukraine. But then I stepped back and wondered, I'm assuming that the story I've been told…
I was asked "What are we going to do about Ukraine!?" And I said, "It's a civil war that's been going on for almost 10 years, what is different now?" and their response was "what? I'd never heard that." And I added, "In 2014 there was an overthrow of an elected president there and it started the war." Blank stares. I have a friend who traveled to Europe regularly for tech training, including Ukraine, and he was surpr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it does, because while you obviously couldn't trust images since two decades or so, you could resort to video which wasn't easy to believably deep fake until recently. But if everything online could be a deep fake, how can you find out the truth?
Videos can be faked too, it is just cheaper now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe we'll go back to trusting local experts that you can meet in person to confirm that they are not a bot. Because anything online will be known to be untrustworthy. Most blogs, chat groups and social media posts will be spam bots. And it'll be impossible for the average person to tell the difference between chatting with a bot and chatting with a human. But humans crave social connections and intimate physica…
When you say "everything online" do you mean every untrusted source? Surely the genie is out of the bottle on communication over the web. That local source will have a website. Because of that I feel like we'll always just have to be vigilant, just like we always should have been. After all, local scams still exist. Real humans are behind the bots.
Yes, but those humans are usually anonymous and on the other side of the planet which makes them feel safe. And that allows them to be evil without repercussions.
Back in the days, I went to LAN parties. If someone spotted a cheater, they would gang up with their friends and literally throw the offender out of the building. That was a pretty reliable deterrent. But now with all games being played online, cheating is rampant.
Similarly, imagine if those Indian call centers that scam old ladies out of their life savings were located just a quick drive away from their victims' families. I'm pretty sure they would have enough painful family visits such that nobody would want to work there.
Accordingly, I'm pretty sure the local expert would have strong incentives to behave better than an anonymous online expert would.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe we'll go back to trusting local experts that you can meet in person to confirm that they are not a bot. Because anything online will be known to be untrustworthy. Most blogs, chat groups and social media posts will be spam bots. And it'll be impossible for the average person to tell the difference between chatting with a bot and chatting with a human. But humans crave social connections and intimate physica…
I suspect that many chat groups (such as Facebook groups), even small niche ones, already have GPT-3-like bots posting messages that seem to fit into the group but that are trained to provide opinions on certain topics that align with the message that the organisation/country controlling them wishes to push, or to nudge conversations in that direction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A skeptic (i.e. someone who cares to verify) not being able to trust media because it might be fake is only a minor problem as long as you have at least one trusted channel. The president, say, can just release the statement on that channel and it can be verified there (including cryptographically, say by signing the file or even using HTTPS). If you lose that channel, then you're pretty much screwed because you'll n…
Agree, and it's even worse than that An incredibly small minority of people even understand your phrase with any actual fidelity and depth of meaning: >>it can be verified there (including cryptographically, say by signing the file or even using HTTPS) Even fewer of that microscopic minority have and understand how to use the tools required to verify the video cryptographically, AND even fewer know how to fully valid…
Kind of, but once you have a single verifiable channel back to the source (in this case, some statement by the president) it's now possible for anyone to construct a web of trust that leads back to that source. For example, multiple trustworthy independent outlets reporting on the same statement in the same way, providing some way to locate the original source. This is why new articles that do not link to (on the web) or otherwise unambiguously identify a source wind me up. "Scientists say" is a common one. It's so hard to find the original source from such things.
This falls over in two ways: sources become non-independent and/or non-trustworthy as an ensemble. Then you can't use them as an information proxy. This is what is often claimed about "the mainstream media" and the "non-mainstream media" by the adherents if the other. All the fact checks in the world are worthless if they are immediately written of y those they are aimed at as lies-from-the-system.
The second way is that people simply do not care. It was said, it sounds plausible, and they want to believe it.
So I would say that actually the risks here are social, not technological. Granted, perhaps a deepfake-2'd video might convince more people than a Photoshopped photo. The core issue isn't the quality of the fake, it's that a significant number of people simply wouldn't care if it were fake.
Doesn't mean we're not screwed, just not specifically and proximally because of falsification technology, that's accelerant but not the fuel.